I Really... REALLY think this game needs a re-balance to help level things out. With that said i still really enjoy the game but i can also handle a lot more BS then most people when it comes to games. the re-balance could help new provinces with security because when you start a new one YOURSELF through random mission it starts with 0% security which is fine because its new. then I got it up to size 6 from grinding missions in the area for it to still give me no mission to build a cannon tower to increase my security oh i did get a light house though, 3 TIMES. I could be wrong but im not sure if there is supplies to allow you to place one without a mission like in the old Windward game but with 0% security you are constantly FKed from pirates and they never go away and once you finish them off then they do a raid on your towns which for some reason the fleet of pirates ship that you kept taking out towns wasn't a raid just a hoard passing by i guess, maybe if they could add a cool down between attacks so you can atleast enjoy the game but with the 30 min pirate raid that had 60 ships in it, back to back i just left. I was attack so much that i just left the province to go upgrade somewhere else which was a bad idea because everyone already had 2 levels up from the starter ship above the one you start with so i thought i would be smart and go to the 4th one from the starter ship where you would need a size 8 town to buy. but once i did I came back to my province where everyone had the same ship as the one i bought including the pirates and random passing ships. I thought I was getting FKed before but now i can even fight more than 2 at a time hell even 1 kicks my ass but the have the attack power to render the complete area useless now> i upgraded everything on my ship had over 200% attack, about 200% hull (health), and 150% armor but yet the pirates had, from some reasons double mortars and volleys. the mortars would destory my armor completely on both sides while take about 25% of my health (just from 1 hit not both) while the volley would pen 50% of my armor and do about 40% to my hull. what im saying is at this low level area that im building up there should be this kind of force attacking it. I would show screen shot but 1 i cant because it wont let me and 2 even if i could i probably would get in trouble for releasing Porn on a game review for as much as the pirates are Fking me.

Kind of OK game but damn the pirates are just annoying. It's like that one mosquito at 2 AM in your bedroom. Doesn't do much but FOR SOME REASON, if there is a pirate ship ANYWHERE on your screen, well, you better go kill it or wait for a horde of friendly incompetent NPC ships to take it down. And here, have some repetitive anti-chill combat music while you are locked out of skill trees, town interfaces and what-not. Pirate dead? Good! Now wait another 10 seconds while we let the music fade until you can resume your activity. Just hurry up because another pirate ship is entering your screen in 5... 4... 3...

bad joke of a game. hint says to put equipment items into harbor to put them on the new war sloop ship. just as i do that, a pirate approaches the harbor and i cant interact with it anymore, having no items equipped on the sloop. i keep dying repeatedly because i cant do anything. pirates capture the harbor and the ship i just spend 2 hours on farming just vanished. idiotic game design. refunded.

Edit: After writing a detailed review Aren revoked the backer key I paid for forcing me to seek a refund through PayPal, and banned me from the community. Response to the dev: You're half right - PayPal won't let you dispute a transaction over 180 days. PayPal issued a credit to keep me as a customer. You never gave me a refund. I was made whole after contacting PayPal. By the way, editing a review resets the review date. I absolutely did not re-purchase your game. You could hover over the review star in the top-right to see that rather than rely on fabrications and insults. It seems your goal was to silence this review from the get go and that's sad. My goal is for this review to be informative, not to devolve into a mud-slinging contest. Be better. --- I'm a long-time fan of Windward and a backer for Windward Horizon, playtesting over 300 hours to find bugs and provide feedback. Horizon expands upon the original with a world map, a rudimentary economy, a handful of banal story quests and changes to the equipment, stats and ships. While often a step forward in some ways, most of the changes suffer from caveats and drawbacks which make them feel like tradeoffs. The charm of the previous title has been lost. The world map of Windward is replaced with one that is procedurally generated from satellite images of real islands. You can not customize the faction perks, stat bonuses, location, or world map without the use of mods which prevent you from playing with that save on non-modded servers. All ships on the world map use the same icon regardless of ship size. NPCs follow the shortest route on the map, optimizing for the same 2 or 3 best deals at the time. They will eventually stack into miles-long convoys hauling goods. While traveling the world map, a dialogue window may appear to alert you that a pirate has spawned to attack you, clearing your destination in the process. The map itself has no currents or weather. Biomes are indicated by the color of the terrain without a legend it is difficult to tell whether the color you're looking at represents "Seattle", "Moderate", or "Autumn". Natural resources are hidden unless you have a province quest, then they are portrayed as question marks requiring you to stop and inspect each one. On a server you may spend much of your time traveling the world map. Single-player does allow you to fast-forward, at least. To quote the developer, he "wants you to spend as little time on the world map as possible". This change is probably one of the most baffling to me. The story is a net negative. Your identity is "captain", and thats it. Most factions have two or three faction leaders which have about as much depth as the AI prompts used to generate them. A select few of these faction leaders are what the dev refers to as "waifus". They are the characters with the most dialogue and interactions. They are not any better written than the rest of the cast. Most of the storylines are filled with tropes and gags, including a fart joke. Some of these interactions are required in order to unlock access to hidden factions. One of the hidden factions has the most powerful and unique talent in the game. The power of this ability is tied to your reputation with this faction. This faction leader is the dev's favorite waifu. None of the other "public" factions enjoy the volley variants they had in the original Windward, leaving all the flavor in one place. There are now just 30 levels with 3 specializations. Every specialization must also deal damage, a healing focused build is non-viable. Further complicating the support role is the necessity to first have the required equipment to be able to apply buffs, and then you must also use your one and only healing ability to apply the buffs. Adding insult to injury is the fact that other specializations have the most relevant buffs built in or can access them through equipment as well. Difficulty is determined by a scaling system. This is entirely invisible to you. One could sail to a lower level region in Windward, it is impossible to do so here. Combat devolves into using all your abilities on your opponent as soon as possible. Combat is entirely an arcade experience with no time for positioning or strategy. Allies grow weaker as the challenge rating increases. The existence of sci-fi style energy shields (armor) and one-shot protection highlight just how skewed combat can be. Completing a quest earns you reputation with that faction and increases their influence. In Windward, you'd retake a region from pirates or an opposing faction. In Horizon, you further your faction's goals and increase their political pressure. This has the tacit acknowledgement that any quest completed for a rival faction is in opposition to the controlling faction. On an official or shared server you may find yourself unwelcome in a province if your faction is not aligned. Traders influence political pressure, so even in single-player you must defend it from elements that you have zero control over. Viewing pressure requires you to enter a command in chat, while influence is only visible when inside a province and docked in a town. Expect to spend hours dragging items across 15+ inventory slots to see if it modifies your stats in a favorable way and do it all over again as you shuffle items around. The lack of an overall character summary further obfuscates aspects of your build. First mates and captains provide additional skills. Some skills are clearly best-in-class, while others are relegated to the bin or don't work in some situations (such as against the game's one boss). Swapping these skills is an expensive and cumbersome process, so be prepared to bring two or more captains to a fight if you want to have multiple builds or utility. Items themselves fall within a group of six or seven archetypes with pre-defined ranges. There are no sets or exotics. The top item tier can actually underperform lower item tiers due to the way items level up. Boss fights are a mess with multiple ships. AI allies will deplete their respawn tokens and your patience as they pile up and get themselves and you killed. If the boss drifts off the edge of the map they will despawn. NPCs will happily remind you of this. Unless its changed, friendly fire is enabled by default on unofficial servers. The first player on the server hosts the world map while the first player in a region hosts it for all others. If a host is distant from you then you'll have to get used to ships rubberbanding on the map and in regions. The game seems to make use of TCP rather than the industry-standard UDP leading to unreliable network performance. The economy is dominated by omniscient NPC traders. You must dock in town and type out questions to get answers about goods and prices which may or may not be honest. Neat in concept, but frustrating in practice. Growing a province is locked behind a quest with many requirements before it can even generate. Founding a province is largely useless as domination quests provide access to the highest tier of goods in far greater supply and with enough money to actually buy your old equipment at full value without requiring you to invest hours of your time micromanaging one or more provinces. There are bugs which have been reported multiple times, acknowledged, and left unfixed: - Whenever too many sounds play at once all sounds will cease - The combat music can become stuck playing indefinitely - Structures don't actually remove their hitbox once destroyed leaving an invisible obstacle which blocks shots and mortars - It is painfully easy to duplicate items and ships and push those saves to the cloud - You can boost prosperity for next to nothing by buying a ship and selling it back If you're interested in some of the ideas Windward Horizon attempts to pull off, I recommend Starsector.

Did you play the original Windward and wished it had better graphics but was worse in every other way? Then you may enjoy this. Otherwise steer clear.

Visually, this game is stunning. Sailing feels smooth. The world is vibrant. The atmosphere is genuinely fun to be in, and early gameplay especially is engaging. When combat clicks, it really clicks. It has that fast, arcadey feel reminiscent of Sid Meier's Pirates! and that’s not just nostalgia talking. It’s a great direction for a naval game: quick, punchy combat instead of bogged-down turn-based nonsense. But then... the weirdness sets in. It’s a game that could’ve nailed the genre been the modern Pirates! we all wanted—but instead, it gets weirdly self-defeating in its design choices. - Want to note, that even though it's suggested that the game is built "with coop in mind" the game is in fact heavily built around multiplayer as a focus- which is why a lot of the systems and design choices are shallow, lacking or bad. Eg. XvX. Thus, these are unlikely to be changed/fixed or built upon.

The Game Feels Great... Until It Doesn’t

None of the issues are deal-breakers in isolation. But they stack.

• The lack of failure states.
• Unbalanced XvX combat.
• An economy that collapses under its own systems.

It creates a spiral where things that feel solid at first begin to unspool and start undermining each other. There are other things that I see others mention that I don't think are a massive issue, like no Pause feature- there's no failure states, it doesn't need one. Pirates constantly interrupting the player- this was more of an issue early game, that solved itself later, I'm unsure why.

Item System: A Beautiful Mess

There’s a Diablo-style equipment system for your ship, and I love that idea. You can equip different sails, cannons, crew, captains, etc.—each with randomised stats. Hull, Armour, Accuracy, Diplomacy, Repair, Mobility... it’s all in there. But it’s also where I feel half the game’s balance goes to die. The scaling feels off. Really off, and I think it's partly due to this system and the level scaling. Ships sometimes randomly one-shot you, even if you’re built tanky and mobile. Meanwhile, if you invest in survivability (Repair/Armor/Diplomacy/Mobility like I have), your damage suffers so much that you can’t actually win fights. You become a tanky pushover. This is due to the game's inherent items "Kiss-Curse" design, where if you take X stats, you are sacrificing stats elsewhere, so you can't have Damage and survivability. Sure, you could swap out builds, run a damage-first cannon/captain combo for some fights and mobility for others but let’s be honest: that isn’t fun. It’s busywork. The result is that the system becomes a tug-of-war with no real payoff. The only viable build? Probably just max damage and hope for the best. This is made worse by the level scaling. If you buy a new ship, all the enemies upgrade ships. If you level- the enemies level, so it feels bad and you feel pigeon holed.

Province Combat Mode: What Were They Thinking?

The province siege mode (XvX combat) is the most baffling design in the game. You’re locked into it for 10+ minutes. Always. Doesn’t matter how powerful you are. Capture every point instantly? Kill the entire enemy fleet three times over? Too bad. You’re here for at least 10 minutes, champ. Only after that timer do respawn limits activate. Then it’s 15 lives per side or 60 if you’re in a bigger ship. Why? No clue. There’s no player agency here. Just a chore. Why isn’t this mode based on lives from the start? I don't think the mode is inherently bad, it's the fact you are stuck inside of it for 10 minutes regardless of what you do. Which means you can quite literally go AFK for 10 minutes- unironically.

Failure States: Missing in Action

There are none. No, seriously:

• Die in combat? Respawn, lose nothing.
• Crew upkeep? Doesn’t exist.
• Provinces starving? They just... wait patiently.

Everything just stalls. There’s no cost to failure, so there’s no pressure. Not even a hardcore mode. You’re never forced to respond to crisis. The world just kind of... keeps going. Which feeds into the economy problem.

The Economy: Cool Concept, Poor Execution

At first glance, the economy is really impressive. Resources move. Provinces produce and consume. When one stops producing, another suffers. It feels dynamic. It fooled me at first—in a good way. But over time, you realize:

• Provinces don’t produce enough to meet their own needs.
• Food shortages are constant. Beverages vanish instantly.
• Growth never reverses. If a province grows, it never shrinks.

So instead of a living economy, you get a one-way resource black hole. Provinces keep growing and demanding more, but there’s no correction mechanism. It’s not that the economy is bad—it’s that there are no counterweights.

Province Management: Weirdly Limiting

When you found a province, it feels like you should own it but you don’t, not really. You can build a workshop but you don't own the resources it produces- it's not Mount & Blade, just a choice. You also can collect taxes but those taxes are tiny and only paid out when you physically visit the settlement. They’re more symbolic than impactful. It feels less about running your own settlement and more about trying to clean up the mess made by AI-generated chaos. You also can't create your own faction, you create like a "mini faction" within a pre-existing faction, so you wont see ships sailing your flags, or your own settlements giving you that "I own this shit" vibe. Existing provinces? You can’t touch them. You can’t assign or replace their workshops. You can’t guide their development. So when your world seed ends up with four Clothiers and barely any food production, there’s nothing to do but shrug and work around it. Why can’t I reshape a dysfunctional province? Why can’t I spend gold or use influence to fix its purpose? I like and have played Patrician, and Port Royale- the fact that I can't buy and run my own Workshops in a game that revolves around you shaping and profitting off of an economy just misses. There’s so much potential here but no real agency. It’s a sandbox you’re stuck reacting to, not one you can actually shape.

Final Thoughts

There’s definitely more, there is more, but this is what stuck with me most. This game wants to be brilliant. And it gets so close. The pieces are all here: exploration, dynamic trade, RPG-like gear, active combat. But the systems don’t mesh. They pull in different directions. And where there should be weight and consequence, there’s nothing. I don’t hate it. Far from it. I’ve sunk quite a few hours into it. And I get it, it’s indie. I don’t know the size of the team, and even if it’s a solo dev, what’s here is respectable. But it’s like brushing against the arsehair of gold. You can see what it could be. It just misses on enough fronts that I can’t recommend it, not for someone looking for a true evolution of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, or for someone hoping for an improvement on that legacy. It’s close. Frustratingly close. But not quite.

Constant pirate attacks. Don't bother doing anything other than combat missions, you are just going to be in combat anyways. Menu UIs are MUCH worse than the first game. Might be ok for multiplayer, but singleplayer is terrible.

Loved the first game, was really looking forward to this, severely disappointed. Quests anywhere but not in the region you are in, wares you have with you can't be sold anywhere, no explanations, and so on. I really tried, but refunded it, it is just pain and no fun.

Start game on a small bark, yet with maneuverability of 500k ton oil tanker, storage that allows a few fishes, yet you are deemed as completely fine for quests to travel across ocean to transport cargos. Then you are immediately dragged into frays, which won't let you unload, skill-up, or even read tooltips properly. In the middle of the constant fight you have to figure how to delete/sell that pos log of wood which somehow got into your inventory with some color pattern for your ship. Purple, Now I am called Commodore Eggplant. Loose city to pirates. take quest to deliver and sell 8 redwood logs, which won't stack and take your whole storage. But no worries. you will be able to buy only one anyway. Buy new ship, with all existing trading commodities locked to old ship, with no way to transfer it over to the new one. I had 50h in its predecessor, but in this case there was no fun at all. This eggplant will require some more time to ripe.

Played the original Windward and loved it—this one just feels like a downgrade. I’m not a fan of how ship upgrades work now. In the original, if I remember right, each part had a dedicated slot—ammo, cannon, crew, whatever. Made it simple and clean. This one? You can slap on like four cannons and two crews on the second ship you get. It's... interesting, I guess, but now you're stuck manually comparing every item to figure out what's worth equipping or selling. I don’t remember ever having to work this hard in the first game just to sort my loot. And don’t get me started on the trading. Absolute trash. You end up wasting hours sailing between provinces—or regions, or whatever they’re called—just to sell one item. Like seriously, how the hell do you mess that up? The only reason I can think of is they tried to make trading slightly more profitable? Maybe? But it’s absolutely not worth the pain of sailing halfway across the map, fighting the wind just to try to sell something, and then heading back empty-handed to do it all over again. I’m fine with the open map, though. The old checkerboard layout was nice, scaling difficulty the closer you got to the center—that was a solid system. Now it feels like difficulty is tied to your ship tier. I stomped everything on the starter ship, then immediately got bodied on the next tier up. Damage skill? Useless. Heal skill? Barely tickled the health bar, only gaining 2% health. Meanwhile, the enemy ripped half my ship’s HP off in one hit. There's also some weird armor mechanic now, but hell if I know what it's supposed to be doing. Overall? The first game’s better. Sure, multiplayer was a pain to set up, but at least the core game loop was solid. Haven’t tried co-op in this one yet—and probably won’t. Not gonna tell my buddies to drop nearly $20 on a game that’s gonna bore 'em to sleep. I’d love to see this game improve and build on what made the first one great, but right now? It’s just not worth the time or money. That said, I’ve got high hopes they’ll make some solid changes or balance tweaks down the line. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on updates, and if they fix this mess, I won’t hesitate to come back and change my review.

I sail a bit IRL and nothing quite captures that feeling as well as Windward. The first game was the same and Horizon even better. Even the big AAA games, even the simulators, nothing quite feels like cruising along in your own sailing boat as much as Windward. I'm not entirely sure how it does it but it captures it better than any other. There's also plenty of stuff going on to keep you entertained on your journey - battles here and there, quests, relationships with the factions, levelling up stats, different cannons, crew, armour, ships, etc.

The community is very kind and welcoming, the dev works tirelessly to keep updates rolling, and the game is FUN (and quite complex). Don't let the simplicity fool you, this is a game you can easily sink a good number of hours into and the price is more than fair! I have been playing co-op with a friend and we struggled some at first, but everything is starting to click. I still have many other areas of the game to try such as helping create a settlement, hunting named pirates etc. Most of my time has been learning the trading and defending ports in a dedicated server. It was so cool seeing a bunch of ships firing at each other with cannon volleys and explosive barrels. I still get a kick out of watching larger ships get blown apart when you hit a last ditch cannon volley! Would I recommend this game: HELL YES! I have paid $60 dollars for games that didn't hold a candle to the fun factor of Windward Horizon and would easily recommend it to anyone that wants a cool pirate game with a little old school flair.

FRUSTRATING. Spent 10 hours on this only to watch everything get wiped by pirates. I wish there were better tutorials. I realize this is a single dev game but holy cow is it hard and unforgiving. Are there save points?

Yar Har it’s a pirates life for me.

just yes

Ten years near to the day here we are, back in the world of Windward with lots of lovely kabooms and that gorgeous ocean. Five years ago l would not have put a bet on it! Guess l have to say this is my jam. l simp for Mook, not for Sonya. P.S. For anyone who reads that spiteful review from the one called Sir Pencil, not only is it an outright lie- his money was refunded, as you can see, he`s not "banned". What a sad individual.

I wanted to briefly touch on something that I haven't noticed in other reviews. This game doesn't force a playstyle upon you. Whether you prefer trading, combat, or questing, or any combination of the three: you will be able to play the way you want, and your experience will be just as viable. I have lengthy opinions as to why the game is good, but I think the other positive reviews are written by other individuals with a better capability of using words than myself. Edited: Typos

Its a step down from the original. Music squeaky and terrible not chill and relaxing like first. Visually no improvement over first game. Somehow clunkier and worse inventory management and "no tooltips for comparing gear because we are lazy/cant code" is the nail in the coffin. I am sorry I should have tried demo first but I thought this was a safe bet, sadly it really is not... It honestly feels like a cash grab from the developer... It's a shame because I enjoyed the original windward a lot. I applied for a refund after 35 mins.

After being voted the captain of my ship I immediately replaced my fellow crew mates with a slightly better crew. Those gullible landlubbers arr arr arr arr

Stupidest start and tutorial I have ever seen for a game. Unless you want to go watch youtube videos just to learn how the game works - don't bother.

Arrr, ye scurvy dog! This be the sail I’ve been dreamin’ of all me days, aye! 🏴‍☠️

*good words*

I've been looking for a Sid Meier's Pirates successor for years. This is it. It's just Sid Meier's Pirates with more depth. I'm loving this.

This will be a reference point for indie games.